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发表于2025-02-02
Empire of Pain pdf epub mobi txt 电子书 下载 2025
A grand, devastating portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, famed for their philanthropy, whose fortune was built by Valium and whose reputation was destroyed by OxyContin, by the prize-winning, bestselling author of Say Nothing
The Sackler name adorns the walls of many storied institutions—Harvard, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oxford, the Louvre. They are one of the richest families in the world, known for their lavish donations to the arts and the sciences. The source of the family fortune was vague, however, until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing a blockbuster painkiller that was the catalyst for the opioid crisis.
Empire of Pain begins with the story of three doctor brothers, Raymond, Mortimer and the incalculably energetic Arthur, who weathered the poverty of the Great Depression and appalling anti-Semitism. Working at a barbaric mental institution, Arthur saw a better way and conducted groundbreaking research into drug treatments. He also had a genius for marketing, especially for pharmaceuticals, and bought a small ad firm.
Arthur devised the marketing for Valium, and built the first great Sackler fortune. He purchased a drug manufacturer, Purdue Frederick, which would be run by Raymond and Mortimer. The brothers began collecting art, and wives, and grand residences in exotic locales. Their children and grandchildren grew up in luxury.
Forty years later, Raymond’s son Richard ran the family-owned Purdue. The template Arthur Sackler created to sell Valium—co-opting doctors, influencing the FDA, downplaying the drug’s addictiveness—was employed to launch a far more potent product: OxyContin. The drug went on to generate some thirty-five billion dollars in revenue, and to launch a public health crisis in which hundreds of thousands would die.
This is the saga of three generations of a single family and the mark they would leave on the world, a tale that moves from the bustling streets of early twentieth-century Brooklyn to the seaside palaces of Greenwich, Connecticut, and Cap d’Antibes to the corridors of power in Washington, D.C. Empire of Pain chronicles the multiple investigations of the Sacklers and their company, and the scorched-earth legal tactics that the family has used to evade accountability. The history of the Sackler dynasty is rife with drama—baroque personal lives; bitter disputes over estates; fistfights in boardrooms; glittering art collections; Machiavellian courtroom maneuvers; and the calculated use of money to burnish reputations and crush the less powerful.
Empire of Pain is a masterpiece of narrative reporting and writing, exhaustively documented and ferociously compelling. It is a portrait of the excesses of America’s second Gilded Age, a study of impunity among the super elite and a relentless investigation of the naked greed and indifference to human suffering that built one of the world’s great fortunes.
Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author, most recently, of the New York Times bestseller Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, was selected as one of the ten best books of 2019 by The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune and The Wall Street Journal, and was named one of the “10 Best Nonfiction Books of the Decade” by Entertainment Weekly. His previous books are The Snakehead and Chatter. His work has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing and the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. He is also the creator and host of the eight-part podcast Wind of Change.
看到book 2,看不下去了
评分篇幅有点长,但内容非常翔实精彩,回顾了Sackler家族的前世今生,从Purdue Pharma的角度描述了opioid crisis的发展。整个litigation的过程除了看到无数人公正的追求,同样也彰显了即使在所谓民主的体制下,仍逃不掉有钱能使鬼推磨的逻辑,只能说是人性的可悲。意外之喜是发现当年在DC最爱的博物馆其实是隔壁的Freer Gallery…?
评分即便跻身欧美上流社会,坐拥数百亿美元的财富,身负世界慈善名流家族的名衔,魔鬼就是魔鬼。他们疯狂地攫取暴利、追逐名誉,无情地侵害上百万人的健康,胶割已遭渗漏的社会财富。罔顾社会责任的资本运力,勾连成网,侵蚀美国政府、司法、商业、监管、咨询、科研、学术、社群、公共言论,酿成一场全美范围的毒祸:在过去的20多年里,致使美国50万余人死亡;整整一代人在药物成瘾和继发毒品依赖的深渊挣扎求生;损失2万亿美元,仍无法扑灭鸦片滥用似瘟疫般蔓延。始作俑者正是显赫的Sackler家族。盛名耀目的光环,隐匿、区隔的存在状态,延续三代的行为事实,Keefe紧扣以冲突构成的主线,凭借掘坟一般的调研功力,将分裂的真相曝光于公众视野。也许Sackler家的人以为,并期待,他们的罪行会像因风而起的柳絮如烟。那只是一种断见。
评分即便跻身欧美上流社会,坐拥数百亿美元的财富,身负世界慈善名流家族的名衔,魔鬼就是魔鬼。他们疯狂地攫取暴利、追逐名誉,无情地侵害上百万人的健康,胶割已遭渗漏的社会财富。罔顾社会责任的资本运力,勾连成网,侵蚀美国政府、司法、商业、监管、咨询、科研、学术、社群、公共言论,酿成一场全美范围的毒祸:在过去的20多年里,致使美国50万余人死亡;整整一代人在药物成瘾和继发毒品依赖的深渊挣扎求生;损失2万亿美元,仍无法扑灭鸦片滥用似瘟疫般蔓延。始作俑者正是显赫的Sackler家族。盛名耀目的光环,隐匿、区隔的存在状态,延续三代的行为事实,Keefe紧扣以冲突构成的主线,凭借掘坟一般的调研功力,将分裂的真相曝光于公众视野。也许Sackler家的人以为,并期待,他们的罪行会像因风而起的柳絮如烟。那只是一种断见。
评分非常全面详细,时间线到2020年,比Dreamland多5年。虽然Sacklers目前看来逃脱了司法惩罚,但是“To gather evidence and tell the story——the true story, the whole story, the story that had so long been suppressed——had a value of its own.”如果想要更直观的了解这个故事,还是要看《Dopesick》。
三代赛克勒家族,三代阿片类止痛药,上千亿身价,几千万人上瘾滥用,几十万人过量吸食致死包括演《断背山》的男主和歌手Prince,FDA、法官、媒体都拿这个家族没办法有的还同流合污,最后赛克勒家族还能保全财产全身而退,企业变成公有制继续生产致命药丸好赚钱补贴给受害者。这...
评分I am floored. This is horrifying. I had to collect myself for a while before I could jot down anything. The level of depravity, greed and selfness is shocking. The fact that this is true history just knocks my socks off. The hair on the back of my neck was...
评分 评分三代赛克勒家族,三代阿片类止痛药,上千亿身价,几千万人上瘾滥用,几十万人过量吸食致死包括演《断背山》的男主和歌手Prince,FDA、法官、媒体都拿这个家族没办法有的还同流合污,最后赛克勒家族还能保全财产全身而退,企业变成公有制继续生产致命药丸好赚钱补贴给受害者。这...
评分Very impressive book, you will have all kinds of human feelings in this book, awe, happy, sad, angry, despair, the description is good, almost like watching a tv series. As the author stated in the end of the book, “my intention was to tell a different kin...
Empire of Pain pdf epub mobi txt 电子书 下载 2025